Lion's Roar
by luxraisin
Summary: Bordertown. Rosemary leaves, and Riley spirals. Loosely inspired by Lion's Roar by First Aid Kit. one-shot


_"You coward! You god damn coward!" _

Her voice rang in his ears. The Fight had been over a week ago, but he still felt her anger when he could no longer distract himself with other things.

_Irreconcilable. Hopeless. Lost._

The words drifted through his mind, intermixing with her threats and cutting observations of his character_. Coward. Fool._ Maybe he was such to think that he could not patch this rift he had invariably torn between them. But he didn't even begin to know where to look for her, couldn't bring himself to take a break from his work for long enough to try for fear of spiraling into obsession, and he knew all too well where that led, where it had led him before he had met her in the first place.

He sat on a rickety swivel chair in his tiny loft, staring around the place she had helped him secure on the fringes of Soho, where the neighbors weren't so sketchy and the home of his editor was close, well away from hostile gang territory. Without her belongings, it seemed empty, and the comfort of its location meaningless. How had she come to be so important to him that she left a physical hole in his living space?

Though the window was shuttered to keep away prying eyes (as well as the weather, because no glass was left from the original architecture), he could hear people out on the streets, going on unaffected by her absence. A tug of envy tightened inside his chest, and he frowned, angry with himself for allowing such a petty emotion to invade his feelings.

But he couldn't push it away. "I never really knew what to do," he whispered.

_What seemed like months later – she had given up keeping track of the time when she came to the Border – she saw the first of the stories in one of the newer magazines that had cropped up since recently, circulating ephemerally throughout Soho for a few days at a time. _

The Lion's Roar.

_She recognized the style even without reading his name printed shakily under the title, yet the subject was strange to her, and if she could have allowed herself to care, she might have been alarmed by the sudden change in tone that she had known from Before._

_ Part of her refused to believe that she was the reason._

_ Part of her swelled with a giddy and triumphant pride at the possibility she might be._

_ After reading through the uncharacteristically dark and fantastical tale he had penned, she carefully folded up the magazine and replaced it out on the window ledge of a building down the street so that someone else could read it when they found it. _

_And she moved on._

He found himself at one of the fancy parties up on the Hill that his Editor would drag him to from time to time, showing him off like some prized pet. Networking is important, the Editor said. So he would shuffle around shaking the hands of strangers whose outfits were worth more than his life, smiling vaguely, rattling off some nonsense about his latest writing when prodded, like the trained monkey he sometimes felt he had become. Pleased the Editor.

Details were hazy, anyway, and remained so. He preferred that to feeling and noticing what went on around him. His blood boiled lightly below the surface, a pleasant kind of warmth that kept him slightly manic, even when he hadn't slept for days. It kept him aware and lively for these outings. The Editor made certain of that.

After the Fight, he spiraled into a heap of self-loathing pity. A month of inert non-productivity passed. Then one day the Editor had turned up at his flat, a place that Riley could scarcely imagine seeing the literary, slid a bottle of pinkish liquid into Riley's hands, given him a pointed tilt of the head and left. Mere hours passed before the writer succumbed to the long-forgotten temptation.

The words flowed, and he didn't complain. The Editor kept him in constant supply.

So he hovered slightly above the ground even at this party, this gathering of pretentious elves in their Realm garb and even more preposterously pretentious humans trying to be like the elves. Since Lost Years, he felt the general level of pretention in the Hill increasing. Hell, it affected Soho, but as long as he kept to his flat, kept to his bottle and his writing, he didn't have to feel any of the weight of that, didn't have to acknowledge the implications that had for the grungy Border life he had fallen in love with. The girl he had fallen in love with.

_But then he saw her there. Changed, she now fit in strangely well with the elves and high society around her. But then, he always forgot – she was an elf, wasn't she? Or at least half of one. Relatives up on the Hill must have dressed her up to fit in. Was that really her, though? His vision blurred just enough that he couldn't be perfectly certain, though he was sure._

_ Curious and emboldened by the ruby poison in his veins, he determined to meet with her group. Though his Editor hovered nearby, all he needed was to nod in the general direction of the group to be followed over and introduced. (At other parties, sometimes he did this, just for something to do: pick a group and silently ask to be introduced. It made his Editor feel powerful, which was handy for when the words were slow to form on the page and financial pressure mounted.)_

_ At first, she seemed not to notice him, though he shook her hand as well as everyone else's. But he couldn't let that bother him. In fact, he treated her just as he treated the others in her party, as a prestigious stranger he had the pleasure and the honor to meet, taking every courtesy afforded him and remaining the enigmatic, eccentric artist of the moment. Perhaps part of him fantasized that she would take him by the wrist when he went to leave or give some hint that she had known him in a past life, make an opening for a rekindling of what they had, but she gave him none such satisfaction._

_ He left considerably numbed that night._

Later, he poured his heart out into poetry, a new abstraction from his usual short stories. This intrigued his Editor when he finally showed her a few days later. Soon the very best was foremost in some of the art and literary magazines that floated.

_ Rosemary Hill_.

His way of letting go, perhaps. Her name and the last place he could bear to reach out for her. That had been at the heart of all of his writing up until the point, attempts to find her.

_Coward._ Her last real words to him rang in his ears again as he sat in his flat alone, staring at the boarded up window. Surely all of his actions had been performed in cowardice, born from the fear of having to stand on his own feet. But he had seen through her false ignorance of him and through even her pretentious new friends on the Hill.

To the open, empty flat, he raised his arm up, lofting a wine glass filled with translucent pink liquid in the air as in a grotesque parody of a toast he had made with that same group at the party up on the Hill. "I'm a god damn coward," he breathed aloud, "but then again so are you."

And he took a swig.


End file.
